Saturday, 31 August 2013

The
foundation course starts at the beginning of August and the first few weeks are
a combination of inductions into technical areas and introductions into
different aspects of basic visual language. Occasionally I will get a phonecall
to see if I can cover because someone is sick and yesterday was one of those
days.

I find it
interesting to dip back into that arena because on the one hand it’s a useful
reminder of the importance of basics but on the other, the way these things are
handled has changed and I get a chance to reflect on how such a large course
has had to adjust teaching methodsin
order to manage the numbers, as well as having to manage the fact that first
interviews for degree places are much earlier than they used to be. Degree
courses now starting interviews in February as opposed to Easter.

Above all
it was fascinating to see that the day’s session was to be based upon an old
Albers exercise.

The day
was broken into two sessions and was the first day of a block of drawing. I was
to work to a set exercise whereby students had to create a rectangle within an
A1 sheet of paper, the dimensions of which were already given and horizontal
divisionsindicated as so; two bands of
5 cm, followed by a larger band of I think 15cm then two of ten of 10 etc. Once
students had very faintly set out the initial rectangle, they were to use
masking tape to make sure all marks were clearly going to stop exactly at the
indicated edge, and the first band was also to be taped off at its edge to ensure
no marks would penetrate the band below. Students were to use an ‘F’ pencil to
mark out the rectangle edges and then no other marks to indicate bands except
for marks on the masking tape which could be used to help get the tape straight
and in the right place, as they proceeded to draw within the confines of each band.

Then once the frame was drawn in, the drawing of lines would use pencils, either 2 or 3B.

Each band
has to consist of a series of controlled vertical lines, lines that would explore various degrees of darkness, control, spacing etc.

Once the
students have taped off the initial vertical A1 rectangle we look at hand and
body control. The first issue is how to assess a vertical. Some students have a
tendency to make marks with a handedness, either to the left or the right. We
spend some time thinking through how and why this might be. Asking questions such as, "Which foot is the
weight on when you start drawing", "How do you hold a pencil?" We look at how shoulder muscles support the
arm and how you can lock the arm into position so that it is easier to draw a
straight. I also show them what a plumb line is and point out it can be used to make sure their paper is straight and true to the vertical when attached to the wall. Students are for this session working vertically against a paper taped to a wall and many of them have always
drawn resting their hands as if they are writing, so we have to also look at different ways to hold a pencil when you work at different angles or heights and how to rethink the hand, wrist, arm, shoulder, body,
legs relationship.

All of
this is as it was, the difference is that in the past we would have asked the
students to decide on the size of divisions, range of materials and the format of the rectangle. I
did get a sheet to give out after dinner that actually stipulated what each
line should look at. I think I was supposed to have had that right from the
beginning, so I suspect my group had a little more leeway as I asked them to
make their own minds up as to what they would explore in each band. For
instance if lines were very close together, perhaps the next band might make
the gaps between lines slightly wider. If the texture of the wall behind the
paper was making the marks have a certain character, then they could insert
another sheet of paper behind theirs and therefore be able to see the
difference. If they had managed to make a transition between faint marks and
heavy black ones using blocks of 10 lines, the in the next band to try blocks
of 15, if the lines of one band were done quite quickly, perhaps the next band
should be done much slower and with more thought about control, etc. The sheet I
gave to them gave clear instructions such as each line in one band to be set
out 1cm apart, then in the next a different control mechanism and so on.

I
understand why the control has become so rigid, in the past because we wanted
variation and hopefully some degree of confusion, we celebrated the unexpected,
we valued the student who managed to come up with a variation none of us had
thought of. However what this could mean with larger groups is that the main
point would get lost. That was of course that control is vital. It is also a
chance to check that students do simple things like think through how you can
sharpen a pencil in different ways in order to obtain changes in mark quality.
The tight framework makes sure all students have thought through the importance
of careful control over everything including masking tape. We had a period of time when we just looked at the tape. Those who put it
down too firmly finding they might tear the paper when it is removed. Students soon realised that masking tapes were all
different, not only in slight variations of colour but in degrees of stickiness. They realised you could make it less sticky by applying it to the wall and pealing it back off before applying it to the paper. We looked very
carefully at the paper and its grain and I told them that the course had had to
send the first paper delivery back as the paper was not of good enough quality.
Care over the small details was emphasized as being vital. I think that in comparison
with a similar session from 30 years ago, we would have mentioned how important
control was, we would have though assumed that it was the student
responsibility to take that on board, would have done less work making sure each element was understood and would have not made each and everyone
of them ‘obey the rules’.

As the
drawings progressed during the morning I made several interjections. At one
point getting to see how the various rhythms that were being developed could be
sounded out, making various noises to different rhythms, much to their amusement but
also perhaps opening out their awareness of the possibilities of ‘eye music’.
At another time we looked at the similarity in structure to soldiers marching
and how the beat of their own hearts lay deep below their awareness of rhythmic
structures. The final part of the session consisted of reflection in their notebooks. I tried to get them to open out the reflection in order to try and grasp the possible poetry and metaphoric connections available to them. We talked body metaphor and embodied knowledge, we looked at how an awareness of the body was linked to an awareness of how concepts came into being. The importance of bi-lateral symmetry and how all objects we design look like us. This offered a way to examine control as a type of mirror, a mirror whereby we examine all things through our own lens.

Over
dinner students were asked to look for examples of things experienced in the
real world that were similar to the ‘abstracted’ experience they had been
involved with.

The
afternoon session was again very tightly controlled.

Students would spend the session working from a section of a newspaper trying to copy its visual texture, whilst not copying the letters or the images, an old exercise in abstraction.

A
photocopy of a student exercise taken from an Albers text was given to me to
hand out, together with photocopies of various pages from newspapers. The
afternoon session was to start with getting students to recognize that ‘visual
texture’ was a very powerful code. When they first set eyes on the photocopy of
the page of marks provided it initially looked as if it was a newspaper.
However on close inspection students realised that it was simply a set of marks
organized in the way newspapers are set out. Each letter had been replaced by a
mark and all the column spaces maintained. Their task for the afternoon was to
recreate the page of the newspaper they had been given in marks. A somewhat
daunting task, which demanded lots of trials and texts in their notebooks.

The
students worked on this all afternoon, having to make decisions as to how to
deal with photographs and large text, both of which demanded some degree of
rationality as to how representation could be avoided. We looked at breaking
down images into proportions of tone and banding these horizontally across the
same sized rectangle, large text was harder and students had to become quite
inventive as to what could stand for the letter without actually being readable
as a letter. The point was I think made quite early on during the afternoon. The
ridged nature of the exercise however meant that time just had to be put in, in
order for the drawings to be ‘readable’ and concluded. There is a good lesson
to be learnt from this and that is that careful control and crafting takes time
and that once completed the effect can be quite powerful. Again in comparison
to similar drawings done in the past, we would have not been so insistent on
completion, once the point had been made we would have moved on to something
else or asked the students to invent a similar idea for themselves. It is the
predictability that has changed most. The large numbers are hard to control and
as portfolios have to be ready early and as learning outcomes have to be met
and evidenced, this sort of control has become essential. Personally I still
find it difficult, because I keep wanting to go off on tangents or move on at differing paces, but in the way it is done it does mean that all students are
democratically given equal weight. Those that did not ‘get it’ in the past,
would we would think, have the ‘penny drop’ at a later date, which often meant
in reality, when we were looking at their portfolios at an even later stage,
jettisoning most of their first term’s work as poor, because none of their work
had been seen through to a conclusion. Control v discovery an interesting
issue. The one a reflection of the scientific mind the other a ghost of
Romanticism. Both necessary at different times but I’m afraid I’m still tainted
with the Romanticism of old and still yearn for the confusion and
disorganization of earlier times, times when the space still existed for stories and
oddballs flourished. Art college was then a refuge for scoundrels as well as a place
for poets to find a voice, but I’m not sure it can be anymore. Patrick Oliver would
be turning in his grave if he knew about the tight restrictions I gave out in
yesterday’s session and would decry the session’s control as one designed to
train youngsters for a life of servitude and a disgrace to the muses of poetry.
Perhaps he would be right too.

I never got round to the second part of this post and found the draft the other day so have used edit mode to pop it in here.

I've been so busy covering for people off ill this week
that I have had no time to think about the continuing blog. So what did I
cover? Wednesday dissertations all day, one to one tutorials, (I'll get round
to what is done at some time but not now) Thursday assessment cover for
Foundation during the day and then teaching perspective to evening Access
students till 9pm. (I'll at some point look at this too as I've taught
perspective for many years and it can still be useful and when approached
sensitively can be used in really interesting ways to think about the way we
interact with the world) Friday was back to assessments for Foundation and
helping set up studios in the afternoon for new modules in specialist areas
starting on Monday. Finally managed to have enough energy left to open e mails
on Saturday morning and Derek had responded to my last week's post about doing
more Foundation cover. There is some synergy here because the assessments meant
that I saw the whole of each student's portfolio starting from week one until
now, which is the start of the specialist area. Too tired to go into this now,
but things have become driven by tick boxes, large student numbers and my old
hate; the need to track the learning outcomes.

Derek had e mailed me as a reminder that there was a
lot of bread and butter stuff going on and that I shouldn't forget to tackle
that as the blog progresses. He is of course right, but the exciting stuff is
always more memorable. As the year unfolds hopefully a lot more of the nuts and
bolts will be dredged from my memory. This is Derek again sending his
memories….

He begins with the fact that I'm to blame for this,
which I totally accept, as he states. . . . . "you are entirely to blame for
this dribble of effluent, I make no apology", he has of course now inadvertently fallen into the trap
of adding to this growing pool of effluent, but hopefully one day it will be
filtered and strained for that crystal clear stream that lies deep down under
the murky layers of fading memories.

Derek's post:

"We used to ask students to do tonal drawings on
a sheet of paper that had been rubbed and dusted with charcoal to give a
uniformly grey surface. This could be worked into with a rubber and chalk and
onto with black to play with gradations of tone to define where forms existed
in space in relation to each other. There is a demonstrable phenomenon that on
white paper, dark tones of grey to black will be seen to come progressively
forward and whites will recede, and on black paper the opposite is true. That
way of opening up space within the frame of course the students had to find for
themselves – they were simply encouraged to force things back or pull things
forward as if that was the easiest thing in the world. This would also be where
‘carved’ lines came in (adjusting both edges of a line) to make lines disappear
towards the back of the pictorial space, changing tone as it went. The spaces
too were ‘carved’, as they were integral to the whole as much as any form that
existed within the space. It was never regarded as an exercise, but a creative
discovery as the elements of the drawing had to be controlled and ‘seen’ as
working or not during that manipulation. Drawing always required (sometimes
radical) adjustments that might involve the obliteration of several hours work,
and this was always encouraged as a brave and courageous thing to do.
“Controlled” may be a misleading word as the trick is to work in an
instinctive, flexible way that allows accidents to happen as that often results
in sublime pieces of language that in an overly self-conscious controlling
approach you could never have discovered.

As a contrast to the uncertain complexity and playful
nature of problems that were proposed to Foundation course students, when the
idea of a uniform brief across the college was introduced, an ‘ideal model’
brief was circulated. The object of this brief was for each student to work on
a cube of wood, painting one side white, another side varnished, another side
wax polished and so on. Quite a few of the staff were rendered speechless.

At some time a student coming back from an H.E.
interview reported being told “You can always tell a Leeds folder from the
amount of charcoal in the seams”.

Creating
complementary greys with oil pastel (ahhhh shriek no not that!!!!) Ah but think
of the sexiness of those pinks blues greens greys!

Now
this is where I have an identifiable loss of memory. I always thought in later
years it had become too much of an exercise, still worth doing, still about
manipulation and cognition, but I think it used to be done better with a stronger
sense of imagery as a starting point.

On
my Foundation year I remember spending a winter colour week in the woods in
Meanwood (snow, pork pies and pickled eggs in the Myrtle) and Gavin making
little vignettes of scraps of vegetation on the grey mud, greens, a tiny touch
of red, hint of grey/orange or grey/purple, and he’d say “Mix an equivalent of
that – it won’t be the same - it’ll be different – don’t copy it, make an
equivalent - do you understand that (a.m.) d’yoounnerstantha (p.m.)? Somewhere it
was about maintaining the integrity of a surface, adjusting the scale of a
saturated colour so that it didn’t leap out but was kept in place by the
manipulation of its size and context. But somewhere it doesn’t matter too much
what was said, as just the continual encouragement for the student to keep
tackling the problem could produce results.

Whatever
the brief there was always the emphasis on finding solutions, inventing, making
a leap of faith, lateral thinking, suspending disbelief. That emphasis on
finding solutions in the inventive sense as well as the aesthetic was key in
Patrick’s conundrums, whether that was visualizing a coffin for a bicycle or
wiring up imaginary traffic lights, and could simply be justified with
reference to Coldstream’s vision of the value of a Fine Art degree as
contributing to a better quality of life, or, more realistically, answering the
demand from employers for employees who could demonstrate flexibility and an
ability to adapt to change. Foundation has always been a breeding ground of
exactly those transferable skills".

I remember
Colin Welland on the radio once talking about the fact that when he left school
he went on a Pre-Diploma in Art and Design which was what Foundation courses
were called then (I did my Pre-Dip at Wolverhampton). He realised when he was
on the course that he was an actor not an artist, but the experiences the
course gave him had stayed with him for life and he thought everyone should do
a Pre-Dip as it had diagnosed him perfectly and set him off on the right
direction with a sense of excitement and wonder in discovery and being lost but
loving it.

Friday, 23 August 2013

As the research continues various strands start coming together. I have made up the images for the colour separations in silk screen, so I'm ready to print, however the print room won't be available again until the second week in September. Foundation started this week and inductions are underway, so great to see the space being used but not so good for drop in access. The print room up at Blenheim Walk is also being totally rebuilt so is closed down until further notice, I presume this means it will open end of September. The idea that you can work in college during the summer is always a bit of a pipe dream, there is so much work to do, refurbishing old equipment, adjusting spaces to deal with changes in incoming student numbers, installing new machinery etc etc. I have therefore returned to drawing. I'm also continuing to write about drawing and have got the first chapter underway about language and time. This is quite helpful as I'm kept very aware of what drawing means as a communication tool when I'm working. I've written a lot about the way drawing can compress different information into the same space and release it simultaneously, so it makes sense for me to be looking at this as part of the research. I've taken the images I have been working on, the fires and mountains and have started to combine them in drawings. See below.

The studies are useful to my main practice as I'm including this image in the top section of a new drawing, which will hopefully be finished for a show in mid-September. The aspect of compaction I'm looking at here is one artists like Cozens or Dali used. The fact that an image can be either one thing or another. It's an old trick, but it still works to energise an image because the viewer has to engage with their own perceptions and be aware of possible alternatives. The problem is though that you need to give clues if a reading is not balanced, in this case the mountain is outweighing the fire, so I am including camp fires in the foreground of the final large drawing. To give an idea of what I'm writing at the moment the selection below is an extract from a chapter entitled; 'Drawing as a record
of perception'. I've moved on now to look at Zen Buddhist drawings and making notes on how calligraphic brush drawings embed time in a different way. The extract is a reflection on a particular Watteau drawing, the Flute Player.

‘The Flute Player’ is a typical Watteau drawing from
the early 18th century. This sketch was probably done to help him
think through the content of one of his paintings. At first glance the simple
reading is given to us by cultural clues, the man’s hairstyle, clothing etc.
all suggest a time of roughly 300 years ago. However there is a lot more to
this drawing. We can start to follow the artist’s focus and interest by
reflecting on the various levels of engagement he has with differing elements.
Some parts of the figure are barely there, ghosted in to support the main areas
of focus, which are the face and the hands. Immediately we notice this we put
ourselves back into the position of the maker, we re-live the time of the
drawing’s making as our eyes re-trace the artist’s movements as he picks his
way around the subject of perception. Finally we realise that one area in
particular has been singled out as being the entry point into the drawing, the
flute player’s left hand. The dark shading under the fingers helps to also push
the space outwards towards the viewer, operating as a type of atmospheric
perspective, (dark marks come forward, softer light marks recede) and
recreating a moment of spatial awareness that would have been part of the
initial experience. Condensed in this one image we have several time based
issues operating simultaneously. The first is one of historical time, (the historical past) the second is a time of
reenactment, in language we sometimes call this the past perfect progressive
tense, as in “he had been drawing”, the third is however the present tense,
which is constructed out of the fact that you are actively looking and your
eyes scanning the image now, the present tense being what makes the drawing
important, it is active today as well as being a record of the past.

So why is this
important? Above all it tells us a lot about the human condition. The image
embeds within itself a record of a period of skilled concentrated looking. The
skill involved here is very important, it takes on average 10,000 hours for a
human being to master a skill of this level. (Sennett, 2009) It is a level of
accomplishment that means that the actions of the maker have become tacit; the
hand is therefore released from the mind’s pressure of having to think about
making and the artist can respond to the moment of perception without any
barriers. We are therefore far closer to the original perceptual experience and
we live as it where, in the same time as the original encounter. This is not
the same as the frozen moment of a photograph, it is a layered time, one that
opens out to the viewer the longer the image is looked at. The drawer’s
decisions becoming more and more transparent to us as we retrace his interest
via the changes in focus and attention to details encoded within the marks. In
this way we develop another engagement, one with the artist himself and his own
engagement with his world and its people. The grammar and syntax of this image
are developed by the materials of its construction. The paper ground has a
particular granular texture, this being essential to the application of the
chalks, which rely on a tough surface on which to pull off tiny fragments of
material from the stone-like core of the solid pastels. The touch of the artist
is here vital, too much pressure and the mark clogs the grain of the paper, not
enough and the trace is too light. The speed of application is also important.
Each stroke becomes a sign for the eyes to follow and we track the artists hand
with the same skill that our ancestors tracked the spore of a deer, being able
to read as much in the differences between mark speed and weight of
application, as between the weight of an animal’s imprint in soft ground and
the shape and relationship of its hoof-prints as it slows down or breaks into a
startled run.

Learning to read the
marks that construct a drawing is something that itself takes time. A young
hunter would spend several years being instructed how to read the signs of an
animal’s track, in the same way a young artist needs to look at many drawings
and take time to unravel the story that is frozen in the marks of their making.
The more you look the more you see. Look at these marks more closely and you
will see that some of them are applied with chalks that have been sharpened so
that more fine detail can be picked out and other chalks are used on their
sides so that broad areas can be touched in quickly. You start to realise that
as the artist’s attention and focus moves his hands follow by choosing
different tools or by using the same tool in a different way. When we read
poetry we listen for how rhythm changes to reflect mood, or the way particular
words are chosen to make us more aware of the complexity of content and how
this is reflected in the sound structure of the poem. In the same way the
draftsman can vary mood and contextual understanding by these changes in
application and the way the ground is manipulated into becoming a space for
action. The construction of visual
rhythm is vital as it on the one hand creates life, by giving a visual
heartbeat to the work, and at the same time operates as a guidance system for
the eyes, pushing vision quickly over certain areas and slowing it down when
necessary point of focus are needed. The dark points of shadow under the left
hand of the flute player in some ways operating as full stops as well as
spatial indicators. The full stop in a sentence gives us time to breath and get
ready to move on, but it also signals that a particular piece of information
has been summed up or concluded. These points are vital to the language
structure as they indicate a certain closure, the left hand being perhaps what
Barthes would term the ‘punctum’ of the image, or as he helpfully put it, that which 'pierces the viewer'. (Barthes, 1993).

All of these marks are of course made by
one material rubbing off onto another. In this case chalk is the material that
is eroded and broken off by the paper. Chalk is one of our softest rocks, and
one that has been used as a drawing material for thousands of years. Pastel is
a man made variant of the naturally occurring chalk, powdered chalk being bound
back together with coloured pigments using various binders, including in
Watteau’s time, oatmeal and honey. The fact that this soft rock can also
represent flesh and clothing, that it can be read as other than what it is, is
something that every artist is acutely aware of. In particular artists working
in Christian Catholic countries were aware of the importance of transubstantiation, that moment in the Mass when, “that wonderful and
singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of
the whole substance of the wine into the Blood…”9 of Christ occurs. The
still magical moment when marks and lines of a drawing suddenly appear to be
something else, is a singular moment that pops into being every time someone
looks at a representational drawing. The moment of transformation being given
more power the closer the drawing achieves a balancing act between a clear
presentation of its reality, (in this case chalk marks scraped off onto a rough
paper surface) and the way its marks are grouped together to suggest the
appearance of something. Too much ‘photographic’ detail can inhibit this moment
as the mind has no work to do in recognising what it is possible to see and
uncontrolled distortion or weak observation on the part of the artist can
result in a failure of the audience to recognise what is being represented. In
effect a failure to control the use of the artist’s language.

A further aspect of language of course
is that it can create subtlety and nuance by the use of adverbs and adjectives.
These are conditioning and modifying tools and in the case of drawing the
choice of implement is vital to this. Chalks have a certain softness in their
application, something we can understand if we contrast chalk with other
materials. Imagine this drawing done in pen and ink, it would be too harsh, too
firm in its tone. Chalk can caress the surface and yet still be controlled well
enough to suggest an underlying firmness, the musician’s head clearly has a
firm bone structure beneath it. However chalk handled in this way, also
suggests a fragility, a gentle light touch, the rapidity of its application
further suggesting the rapid passing of time. This brings us to a further,
deeper realization of time within the drawing. These fleeting glimpses of a man
playing a flute are also a metaphor for the fragility of all our lives. As the
man plays he is playing a forgotten tune, one that will drift off and quickly
fade away. The drawing’s lightness of touch being one that reminds us of smoke
forms drifting through a room or clouds making momentary images as they
shape-shift across the sky.

The composition and overall formal
relationships are used to fuse the elements together and organise our reception
of them. Again rhythm is vital to this and the swirling movement of the body
and soft curves of the clothes and hair echo the sound of music coming from the
flute, which itself is the only straight line in the composition, a diagonal
linking hands with mouth and giving the eyes a moment of rest. Watteau catches
a brief moment and holds it for us, but as we bring this moment back into the
present through our engagement with it, we are also affected by the realisation
of its import. Behind the membrane of the paper surface lies an intuition of the
world of the dead and their spirits and for brief moment as we look at this
drawing, we can perhaps in our minds touch the surface of the Paleolithic cave
wall and from behind it feel the trembling hearts of our long dead ancestors.
In some ways every drawing reenacts all the other drawings that have been done
since humans first made them over 30,000 years ago. We are still the same
species and still have the same short lifespan within which to experience,
birth, growing up, maturity, old age and death. The tools we developed to help
us get through were honed to perfection a long time ago, and as part of our
realisation of what it is to be alive now, we should celebrate this.

Sunday, 18 August 2013

The art in a box
aspect of fine art research is still ongoing and I have now managed to make a
couple of reliefs as a test. See below.

Mick Welbourne who is the manager of the print room in Vernon Street, helped me to think through the process and we screened acrylic ink onto copper plate and used the ink as an acid resist, using ferric chloride to bite away the unprotected areas of copper. The best results came from about 1.5 hours biting. We also found out that ink left overnight and then screened onto the copper sticks much better and provides an even stronger resist. The shiny final look is because I wanted these cards to feel a little like the 'tranculments' or ornaments I used to polish with my mother when I was a child. The years of polishing had worn the images on the horse brasses and similar ornaments down, but at the same time they had developed a patina that clearly communicated my mother's domestic love of being house-proud. I need to keep touch with the source of my ideas and each time I refer to my childhood it seems to be a touchstone that grounds the deeper significance of my practice.

These metal reliefs
willbe used to make ‘card houses’ or
can be displayed on the floor or on a wall or within the fine art area's 'travelling box’ depending on the
final design and or rules for display that the group devises.

I’m also planning to
get the cards screen printed in colour on an appropriate card, so that full sets of playing
cards can be produced and tarot type games played.

This is a colour
test for one image to be printed in three colours and then guillotined to make 16 cards, there will be four of these printed and the dog biting it's tail used as the image on the reverse of all the cards.

The practical aspects
of the research are however taking much longer than anticipated and I’m not
sure when I will have all these things completed because most of the Blenheim
Walk workshops are being refitted and the Foundation course starts back next
week, which means that the Vernon Street printroom and staff will be snowed
under with inductions soon.

However, I’m
balancing this work with three other projects, one of which is to develop a
more theoretical strand, in which I’m looking at going back into specific aspects
of drawing research (the grammar and syntax of drawing language) and linking
with a member of staff from the Hong Kong Institute who is also interested in
this area. I'll post a complete review on this at some other time as it is complex and detailed, but intimations as to where I'm coming from with this are already recorded in earlier posts, look at the posts tagged drawing.

However I’m also
still learning how to use 123d Catch software and have been exploring the ways
it can be ‘glitched’ by giving it insufficient information to process by taking out of
focus photographs or focusing on unimportant areas and editing out the areas I
don’t want. As I’m also working on the forthcoming exhibition, “There is nothing like a good shave to
make a pig feel like a man again”, which will
open on the 15th of September, it seemed like a good idea to explore
the possibilities of using new technology to go alongside what I’m doing using
traditional hand drawn techniques. The image of pigs has been used as a
metaphoric substitute for people, (long pig etc) by several cultures and our
close relationship with animals and their representation goes back to cave
paintings from 30,000 years ago. This aspect of time is something I’m going to
explore further in the more theoretical research. Hopefully once the college
starts back again and all the workshop areas are in full swing, I will also be
able to get some actual 3D objects made using ‘123d Make’ to control the
output. As you can see from the image below, the paradoxes of inner and outer, object and environment can be played with and reconfigured in potentially very interesting ways.

The
knitting of various strands together and the weaving in and out of practice and
theory also reflects the design of the new pathway structure in fine art and
the introduction of the COP3 module, which is designed to get students to keep being involved with practice while developing theory alongside it. The previous use of dissertations to develop a more theoretical underpinning to practice was felt to often create a schism between practice and theory,
students often neglecting their practical work while they concentrated on
bookish learning. Hopefully I can get enough work done to provide an example of
how the two forms of thinking can be undertaken in such a way that they enhance
each other.